life

Within Borneo’s Gomantong Caves – slippery with teeming insects, bird droppings and guano from two million bats – fine dining is likely far from the mind. But overhead a perilous harvest ensues for the key ingredient of Chinese bird’s nest soup.

In Los Angeles, everyone has a story and they’re eager to share it, but the enthusiasm to divulge personal details can have a traumatic side.

On a journey around the Great Lakes to honour his mother, the author takes his cue from Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore and turns his ear to the water to listen to his surrounds.

On the road between gigs in Serbia, Hugo Race can recall the optimism in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell as more recent history comes darkly to bear.

Looking into the eyes of humpback whales in the seas off Tonga can make a visitor feel omnipotent and inconsequential all at once.

The tidiness and folksy veneer of Portland, Maine, lends a Truman Show feel to the seaside city they call ‘Vacationland’.

Vietnam’s efforts to attract tourists to its rapidly multiplying resorts on Phú Quoc, in the Gulf of Thailand, risk making the island a victim of its own success.

The galleries of billionaire art collector Liu Yiqian’s Long Museum West Bund, in Shanghai, are presented with a chic industrial grandeur, but some of the rough edges are unintentional.

Outside Oslo, a forest has been planted that in a hundred years will provide the paper for an anthology of renowned writers’ work, which will remain unread until then.